ABSTRACT
The Baltics and Poland successfully undertook the Herculean task of constructing viable states. Ultimately, four successor states emerged in northern and western Intermarium: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland. Competing nationalisms contributed to the destabilization of the region, which also experienced serious economic problems in the Great Depression, in Poland, in particular. Nonetheless, during the interwar period, even the minority experience was relatively speaking rather mild in the northern and western parts of the Intermarium. Poland's victory of 1920 spared the northern and western parts of the Intermarium the terrible fate of its east and south, where the Bolsheviks reconquered much of the territories of the Old Russian Empire. They claimed swaths of the Ukraine, including Kiev, the Crimean Peninsula, and about half of White Ruthenia with Minsk for themselves. Eastern and southern Intermarium became the separate administrative entities of Soviet Ukraine and Soviet Belorussia in the putatively happy proletarian family of peoples of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
